Single-event upset studies of a high-speed digital optical data link

ATLAS is a large general-purpose experiment, which will be located at the Large Hadron Collider, LHC. The performance of electronic and optoelectronic components for a 1.28 Gb/s radiation tolerant optical read-out link for the ATLAS liquid argon calorimeter system has been studied. A demonstrator optical link based around the use of the commercial G-link serializer chipset, Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser Diodes and multimode optical fibers, has been built and tested in neutron and gamma radiation environments. The components have been found to be radiation tolerant up to at least a neutron fluence of 1.7 X 1013 n(1MeV(Si))/cm2 and an ionizing dose of 800 Gy(Si). However, Single-Event Upsets (SEU) in the G-link serializer chip were observed during neutron irradiations. An estimate of the expected ATLAS SEU rate, based on the use of Burst Generation Rate curves for silicon has been performed and leads to an error rate prediction of 2 +/- 1 errors every 100 hours of LHC running.